14 posts tagged “development”

Clicky, on Siliconera.

Omega Five is an amazing feat. The graphics and sound are absolutely amazing, but they fit below XBLA's original 50 meg limit. Crazy huh?

I've been wondering what kind of direction to give the audio guy. With art, I'm familiar, I can give rather specific critiques and even do some concept art on my own(even if it's crude.) But audio? I can give a theme and then upon hearing a draft of the work and respond with basic stuff like the tempo isn't quite right, some of the instrument choices feel out of place but I feel like I'm trying to salvage the original rather than guide the creation of something better. That and it doesn't help that I get other songs stuck in my head and I feel like they work. I will improve my ability to imagine what something should sound like as well as look like!

Fortunately for me, the audio guy I work with is very understanding and I can easily talk with him and tell him my concerns.

Namely, the power of really simple techniques in sprite art. I've been trying my hand at doing sprites and going over board on selective outlining, manual anti-aliasing and just making a muddy mess. Guilty Gear does very little of this. It's a formula I can follow, as long as I draw decent frames to base the technique off of. Fan artist Prophetic Dream does a nice job of using GG's techniques in a small scale.

Of all the sprite art tutorials I've found, this has been my favorite, highly technical one. It's wordy, in Japanese but the illustrations say more than a thousand words.
Dot E Kouza
The first 10 Step list covers a lot of important aspects from smoothly translating freehand curves to pixels(Step 3) to calculating pallets based on 8-bit RGB values(Step 7, with more than just grays calculated here.) Pallet construction has been giving me the most grief so far. Just because 2 colors look different enough zoomed in at 500%+ doesn't mean they'll be differentiable at actual size.

Back to the drawing board.

Well, my indie project has me working with 2 very talented and different people. One fellow told me he's not very good at giving time estimates. The other needs hard, fast deadlines to get anything done. I haven't really thought of myself as much of a manager and I've already got this challenge in front of me.

I'll think of something, I have to in order to get this done.

Oh Xbox Live Arcade. You had so much promise which is now...I wouldn't say totally gone, but unless something drastic happens, all I can say is it *had* so much promise. I am an Xbox360 owner. I have purchased about 10 games on XBLA. I've tried about a dozen beyond that at the very least. I've used the Xbox Dashboard on a near daily basis so I know what I'm talking about when it comes to what I dislike about the whole deal. Heck, my Xbox 360 is idling RIGHT NOW AS I TYPE THIS!

Irritation 1: Interface
How many menus I need to go through to get to the games I want to play will get a rant on its own, but the Marketplace for games is terrible. I mean, just freaking terrible. I love how the highlighted color of the text you've selected becomes unreadable. I selected the Spotlight in the Marketplace and "Games" is in this warm grayish white color that's barely legible on the light vermilion background. It certainly doesn't stand out compared to "Top Games" and non-selected options.

I'm looking at a list of games. Full Game - DOOM is selected now. On the right side of the screen is just the name of the game, the rating and a bunch of text scrolling by faster than I can care to read it. Yeah, that really makes me interested. No, it doesn't! What about a few screen shots? A genre? As a consumer, I'm lazy and I'd like to see cool features outlined quickly. *Online Co-op. *Competitive Death Match. *OVER 9000 LEVELS!!!!!! *Smokin' 3D Graphics. You get the idea. I figure everything has been remastered in HD and 5.1 sound so stop wasting your electrons scrolling that.

Say, some of that stupid text actually got me to hit the A button and learn more. I see a link to the demo, full game and any extra crap gamer pictures or whatever if available. At least they finally list the price of the dang thing here. Oh. Do I get any new info on the game? NO! Same lame text from above. The only new info I see is the developer or publisher. Most likely the publisher.

I perused the video interface. Wow. The preview text is a lot shorter. Like, 1, or maybe 2 sentences! Plus I can see a 30 second video preview. I'd like to see a game trailer like that, rather than go to a separate trailers category. Videos get a "Top Videos" list but do games? NO! The games page gets advertisements for TV shows. I guess I see where the money is being made...Quality certify video: make a tester watch it once. Certify a game? You have to pour over the interface, check it for general stability bugs, etc. It's not nearly as easy. You need a tester that really knows what he or she is doing.

Irritation #2! COMMUNITY!
I have an inane confession to make. When cellular phone plans cost $50/month and you had 10 minutes of non-peak time, I used Xbox Live to voice chat with my best friend who was 500 miles away. It was win. People on XBL build clans, teams, you name it for the games they play.

Integrating the community into the marketplace was a revolution that Amazon.com gets a lot of credit for. They introduced a system where you could see the sales ranking, but the biggest boon was you saw what else purchasers of the book you were currently looking at also bought. Free advertising at its finest.

Here's another thing that bugs me. Release slots. Xbox Live Arcade only releases 2 new games a week. I understand this. They want these 2 games to have a full week of being in the spot light and have a chance to sell. Yeah, I know. It doesn't end up working that way due to the clunky interface burying the game. So there's 52 weeks in a year, 104 XBLA games released a year. A lot of developers are upset over how hard it is for them to get their game out.

What better way to get people involved and democratize some of these release lists! Every month, we players pick from a pool of whatever XBLA game has passed certification and is ready for release. Honestly, I'd like to vote for green lighting games too. Let's see here, a port of another game I don't care about or a cute happy co-op dungeon crawling RPG that has a good camera! *Votes* Heck, I'd vote several times a day and try to stuff the ballot box if I really saw a game concept that appealed to me.

I almost missed Omega Five because I saw it, I got excited about it, and then weeks passed before I came out and I forgot about it. Maybe a release reminder would have helped me there. Notify RandomEncounters whenever a game that's cool gets released. Or a 2D shooter. Or some other genre alert.

Irritation 3: Separate the Retro Stuff
They do this with Xbox Originals already. Most developers of original games don't want their products lumped next to buggy ports of 10+ year old console or arcade games.

Countless people I've spoken to want to see this happen. I understand that porting a console game to XBLA is a much bigger endeavor than barfing it up on Wii Virtual Console. Xbox ports get network play functionality, leader boards, achievements, tutorials, demos, etc. Still. Separate please. Thanks!

Irritation 4: Game Rep & User Reviews
I know this should have been in Irritation 2, but it's important enough to get its own section. I really think they're necessary. I don't know of any major American games website that doesn't let the users post their own reviews alongside their staff reviews. If storage and bandwidth is too much of a problem, let us give a game reputation like players get it.  I can prefer or avoid a player. When I avoid the player, I can list a reason from obnoxious behavior to leaving early, etc. So let us rank games.

Conclusion
These are all changes I'd want to see just as a gamer. I'd heard about a vicious restructuring of royalties from some very irate XBLA developers, but I personally don't know and can't comment on that.

I owe huge thanks to a friend of mine for helping me prototype my game. I thought I planned absolutely everything out. There are so many fine details my initial Game Design Document left out. Like movement speeds in pixels per second. My friend and engineer gave me something playable(it doesn't crash and absolute minimum game play has been completed.) By not having a lot of other things done, it gave me ideas for other things I want to do with the game. Perhaps if I ever get around to making a sequel, I've got fodder for it.

No matter how tight you think your initial design is, prototypes are very very helpful.

Interview with Super Mario Galaxy's director, Yoshiaki Koizumi.

It seems as though in Japan, the director of a game is like the director of the movie. Highly responsible for all aspects of where the development goes. Where he or she points, the rest of the team begins to build towards that point.

Good read.

I wanted to be better about posting here, but I haven't. For this I apologize.

The Job Hunt Stats:
Applications Sent = 23
Attempts at Using Network to get somewhere = 6
Interviews Held = 1 Phone Interview, 2 in-Person(outside industry position.) 1 recruiter called, didn't identify the recruiting agency she works with or provide me her last name.
Offers Received for a full time position = 0

Playing Games:
Went to a friend's house. This friend buys games like crazy, has a drop dead gorgeous HDTV, surround sound system and oh so comfy couch. Plus a cat that likes to rub up against my feet.
Played
-PAIN for PS3
-Assassin's Creed for 360.
-Folk Lore for PS3(different visit)
-Phoenix Wright 3(one of the few indulgences I allowed myself.)

Games I really want to get:
-Zack and Wiki for Wii.
-Super Mario Galaxy for Wii.
-Mass Effect for 360.

On my personal game dev front:
-Still begging and pleading for an engineer I trust to help with a prototype for the last month.
-Still drawing on paper to just get better at it since I'll most likely be doing all the artwork for it.
-Stopped trying to get the prototype.
-Going back to just generating and writing down ideas again.
-Watching the feces hit the fan over the Gamespot firing debacle.

Yes, I know I have been blabbing quite a bit about Earth Defense Force. To me, it is a very important game; it shows that there's still people with sense out there in the industry. Takehiro Homma is some kind of ray of sunshine and he reassures me that I'm not a moron for making a game fun my #1 priority.

Takehiro Homma on developing Earth Defense Force 2017.

Summary
Interviewer: Why did you do something this way? It's not realistic!
Homma: Because it's fun.

EDF is a game people certainly like to bag on. It's not without its flaws, but it's an addictively fun game. Although, hell, a lot of these flaws such as the blatantly unrealistic physics, cheap-for-a-360-game graphics, and destructability of the environment do lead to it being so much fun.

It's refreshing to hear someone who has a leadership role in games that puts fun at the top of his priority list. I've worked with people who tend to be wrapped up in "immersive," "emotionally moving," "full of verbs," or "strategically deep." EDF reeks of B-movie goodness so I suppose it does have immersion. Emotionally moving? It's hardly a Homer or Lord Tennyson poem but thrill and joy? Those are emotions.  Verbs? Really, all I need is "shoot." "Fly" and "Ride" also apply, but vehicles in the game are unwieldly. Stay on foot, you can't collect power ups in vehicles.

Ok, I'm rambling now. Enough of this.

Got something you want to make? Surely you do! Everyone sure does at one point in time.

I certainly do right now and last night, the 2 engineers I'm working with and I got a bunch of tools up and running.
They already have their IDE of choice up, Visual Studio. They grabbed all of the XNA plug ins.

Since this a team effort, source or revision control is necessary. Source control provides backups for all your work so it's a protective measure on multiple fronts. TortisSVN is a free application that works within Windows. No expensive clients. You can control users' access by project too.

For bug and task tracking, someone as Linux semi-literate as I could easily get Mantis up and running. Another free trakcer, you don't have to worry about special client software as it's all browser based. Help keep track of what needs to be fixed, features requested or even done in general.

Sure, you'll need content creation tools ranging anywhere from Photoshop to Open Canvas to Logic, but at least these 3 things will put some basic building blocks in place. Will add more about the development of this indie project as it progresses.

Current Team:
RandomEncounters(Design, Art,QA, Project Managment)
Retina(Engineering, IT)
Furry Trout(Engineering)
RabiteMan(Audio)

This was written by a dear friend, who is working on getting his start up, WhiteMoonDreams going.

1. Get a solid partner. Having a partner who can balance you out is tremendous. Especially when the deal prospects start flying around, it's easy to lose ones head, but it's hard to lose two heads

2. Don't be the sole expert. It's easy to want to take on everything (for awhile, I was handling art, programming AND business), but you won't be able to do that for long. The earlier you start delegating these things out and building that infrastructure, the better your company is going to run when you begin in earnest.

3. Get more people involved. A lot of people might disagree with me on this one, but after the last 6mos of really working with a team as opposed to the previous 4 mos of working with a very tiny group, it's proven very effective. Handing off major portions of starting things up allows everyone to focus better on their specialties. There are a lot of concerns around properly compensating these folk since there's likely no funding yet - there are a lot of options for that, and you'll find that a lot of people, especially your friends, are willing to work with you as long as your vision and goals are sound and clear.

4. Get someone who knows business. Not necessarily just the games business, but business on the whole. Someone who understands what it takes to start and run a company, handle shares, talk to investors, write a business plan, etc etc. The romantic idea is that those of us who start game companies are also the business manager. Personally, I've been doing art and programming for the last 14 years and am not going to pretend that I know a damn thing about business. I've got a business guy, he advises me as does my board of directors, and I make the call based on that.

5. Read Execution by Larry Bossity. We've seen several companies set fantastic goals, yet fail to reach them despite the best intentions and efforts of the crew. This book is an excellent analysis of that process - what goes wrong and how to implement a culture that doesn't fall into the traps that major corporations like GE, Lucent, etc have fallen into. Even though they speak at big business level, the concepts are all sound for small businesses and especially for our industry.

6. Get stellar lawyers and in the beginning, let them hold your hand. I make no moves without my lawyers. Yes, its expensive, but the fallout from having signed a poorly written NDA or even an evaluation agreement can be catastrophic. My lawyers just caught a cleverly written eval agreement that stated that any unlicensed IP that has been toyed with on their product belongs to that company as opposed to us who created the IP. Later on, as we grow more accustomed to these paperworks, the lawyers can step out the way a little more, but at these early stages, it is vital. I even had the lawyers set up the corporations, shareholders agreements, etc. If they know what we've done every step of the way, they're better prepared to defend us if anything happens.

7. Do what you want. I see a lot of developers get out there and start scrambling for whatever project they can get. They get something and then start grumbling about having to do some crap project because it's the first one that they could get and hopefully in the future they'll be able to develop their own IP. I know one developer who has been saying that for the last 5 years while they do ports all the while. If you didn't get into this business to do ports, then don't start out that way. Its easy for a developer to get pigeonholed, and its sad to watch these established developers get passed up for projects they're dying for because they've dug themselves in, while the pub hands them to new devs or shadier devs. I know it probably sounds pretentious, but really, sticking to your guns is what's going to make you successful. Deviating from your path will likely lead to more deviation.

8. Make a business plan. A lot of devs have looked at me funny when I tell them that we have a business plan. We actually have TWO business plans, but that's because there is THAT much planning necessary. A business plan does several things for you:
- It sets a clear path of execution from start to finish for your goals
- It brings out issues in structure, finances and vision very quickly
- It helps you organize and budget your resources properly
- It proves to money people that you know exactly wtf you're doing
I was skeptical on the business plan front until my business guy pounded me on the head enough times to spend a few months working on it with him. Now, it is the company bible. When it's more complete I'll make it available to everyone in the company to see and they can comment on it as well as make decisions that help keep us in line as well as recommend when we need to update it to reflect current thinking.

9. Work only with the people you want to work with. Don't take on someone just because they can do a required task, or because they will fund your company or bla bla. A bad partnership is one of the worst things in business and we've seen plenty of examples of companies that have fallen apart because core individuals can't work things out. Especially at this early time, camaraderie is most important. That being said, don't be afraid to cut bunk. If someone isn't working out, phase them out. You have zero room for freeloaders.

10. Motivate your people with progress. Get a wiki going. Get a regular email chain. Have dinner parties. Whatever. Especially when people are working for free or for very little, seeing ongoing progress and continued solidarity is key. This is definitely true for full production as well, but even more pivotal here.

11. Don't be afraid of game agents. There are some good ones out there. ISM is an example. Think of them as lawyers in court, only the court pays for them, and they kick ass. We're not using anyone yet, but we've definitely talked to some that really know what they're doing. These guys can take your product to people you could never normally reach and evangelize the hell out of you. They can also take a deal prospect and make it even sweeter for you.

12. Hold on to equity like it is your life. It basically is.